Doug Matthews, vice president of information availability for Veritas, says in advance of the formal spin off, the Veritas business unit went back to the drawing board to design a modern information management platform that will make extensive use of metadata to simplify managing the massive amounts of data being distributed across private and public clouds.

To begin to address that issue, Veritas released an update to its NetBackup software, which now provides support for cloud services from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Verizon and Cloudian, in addition to Hewlett Packard. The new version also has enhanced integration with virtual machine software for VMware and Microsoft. NetBackup 7.7 also provides enhanced support for NetApp clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT) and Microsoft SQL Server software, along with better self-service capabilities that allow both IT and non-IT users to independently manage and control backup and recovery.

At the core of the Veritas information strategy is the version 5.0 release of Veritas Data Insight, which will analyze data stored in multiple storage systems running on premise as well as on multiple cloud storage services provided by Box. In addition to monitoring anomalous user activity and behavior, Matthews said that Data Insight version 5.0, due out this summer, will facilitate retention management and compliance, as well as help identify sets of data that are most sensitive to the organization.

Veritas will also address data management issues via Veritas InfoScale, a software-defined approach to managing storage and application availability, and through Veritas Information Map, a cloud application that makes use of data stored in NetBackup to provide visibility into where and how unstructured data is stored across the enterprise.

Finally, via the Veritas Resiliency Platform, which is available now, Veritas is also offering a business continuity service around its backup and recovery software using a combination of local and cloud instances of its data protection software.

In the age of the hybrid cloud, Matthews said the biggest challenge facing IT organizations is reconciling the management of all the isolated data silos that now exist inside and outside of the cloud in ways that take into account both the risks to the data and the service level agreements (SLAs) associated with it. Though enabling such reconciliation would likely take some form of data management nirvana, the amount of actual work to turn that vision into everyday reality is great. In fact, for many organizations, it may turn out to be simpler to just start over than to try to extend existing data management frameworks that were never really designed to operate at that level of distributed scale.

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